Working Outside the Inbox, Step 2: Group Conversations and Identify Use Cases

Well, it's Week 2 of the grand WOTI experiment, and things are moving along swimmingly. We've got a nice little race shaping up in the Sent email department. Jason put us all to shame Week 1, by sending a grand total of three, count 'em, THREE (3) emails, easily winning the WOTI Overachiever of the Week Award. Week 2, we're all settled in for the long haul, and so i thought it would be a good time to discuss Step 2: Group Conversations and Identify Use Cases.

Luis Suarez tells us that it's easiest to first break up the mail in your inbox into 2 categories: Things That Belong in My Inbox and Things That Don't.

Things That Belong in My Inbox

personal/sensitive/1-1 conversations

calendaring/scheduling

auto--notifications

Things That Don't

Everything else. Potentially.

We've started breaking down the "everything else" bucket and grouping them into use cases. We'll be looking to move that information or transaction to a better home.

In a lot of cases, especially in these early days, that means transitioning closed conversations/ tasks/ knowledge-sharing to a more collaborative/open venue, and turning "bad" email into "good" email (auto-notifications). And yes, you are right.... in the short term, that does nothing to reduce the amount of email we get .... but it ensures that the artifacts of that work are shared as openly as possible, with our inboxes becoming the messaging system they were meant to be, NOT the repository of all corporate knowledge.

Here are some ideas:

Requests for work can be better managed through work items in Rational Team Concert or "to dos" in Lotus Connections activities.

Regular status updates/tips and tricks/project status emails can be posted as blog entries in your Connections community, and aggregated as collections through tagging.

Again, it all comes down to mindful processing of email, and spending just a couple of extra moments to stop and think .... is this the best way to share this information? Is anyone else likely to need this knowledge in the future?

Think NOT just of the immediate, tactical need for information or action, but the ability to capture that knowledge/action for reuse so that the entire organization can benefit in the future, and not re-invent the wheel, or waste time recreating knowledge assets that folks aren't sharing.